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The unnamed narrator is a traveling automobile company employee who suffers from insomnia. His doctor refuses to give him medication and advises him to visit a support group to witness more severe suffering. One day on a business flight, he discovers Tyler Durden, a charming iconoclast who sells soap. As more men join in, the 'fight club' becomes an underground sensation, even though it';s a closely guarded secret among the participants.

It is working American Beauty-Susan Faludi territory, that illiberal, impious, inarticulate fringe that threatens the smug American center with an anger that cannot explain itself, can act out its frustrations only in inexplicable violence.

Fight Club jettisons its sense of humour 60 minutes in, and, so far from satirising the tiresome "crisis of masculinity" stuff sloshing around the airwaves either side of the Atlantic, the film simply endorses it.

We're meant to take the male bonding and the blood rituals as a protest against the sterility of corporate life and modern design, but Fincher's sadomasochistic kicks overwhelm any possible social critique.

April 22, 2013

Movie Mezzanine

Fight Club may be iconic and technically proficient, but it's more distant than perhaps any film to attain "modern classic" status.